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Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Homeschool Matzah Bakery

A mama, 270g of flour, about 100g of water, and two matzah-baking kids! Oh, and it was all made possible by two fun pieces of technology: my food processor and pasta roller.

Here we go… flour and water, weighed and ready!

Add flour and start food processor (and the timer; I set it for 18 minutes, just like in a real matzah bakery). Drizzle in the water. I used the 90g I’d weighed out, then added a bit more until it just barely started to come away from the sides of the bowl. The mixture was still very crumbly looking, but when squeezed, it made and held a ball shape. Perfect!

Wedge the ball shape through the “1” position on the pasta maker to get a flat sheet.

Cut the flat sheet into two pieces and continue rolling it thinner and thinner on the pasta maker. Cut the sheets as necessary to keep them a workable, bakeable size.

When the pasta maker got down to the “6” position, I declared the matzah FLAT and handed it over for fork-poking.

Once two pieces are ready, toss them side-by-side onto a parchment-papered pan and into a 500 degree oven to bake for 5 minutes.

Lather, rinse, repeat …!

While the matzahs are baking, roll and poke (we say “poink”) the next sections of dough until it’s all rolled and poinked. We had two baking sheets going at a time, so I’d pull off the pieces after they were done and toss in the next two sheets.

Here’s what we had before the 18 minutes elapsed. These would have been kosher for Pesach had everything in our kitchen been kosher for Pesach. Which it wasn’t, but I still wanted to see what we could do in that time.

Here’s the whole batch, including one that got rolled a little thick and burnt a bit on top.

There! This has easily been the most entertaining 2 cups of flour we will use all year! And because of the 18-minute thing, it’s a super-fast activity as well. Perfect for little kids’ attention spans.